MILK interview in Hollywood Reporter

[John Mullin]

Here’s an article from The Hollywood Reporter yesterday where a bunch of composers talk about their upcoming pictures. Elfman is among them:

Milk (Focus Features)
Composer: Danny Elfman
Director: Gus Van Sant

I knew that the story was very simple and the way Gus shot it was very simple. It’s not a very impressionistic, dreamy movie, so there would have to be some very simple theme that would play the heart of the emotional side of the story, which was Harvey Milk finding himself and kind of opening up and blossoming into this leader.

The titles are a very odd piece — that was Gus’ choice because there was a theme I wrote for much later in the movie, for piano and strings, and it was written for a long montage of Harvey going to work his last day and his conversation with Scott (James Franco) on the phone and Dan White (Josh Brolin). Somehow you could see that something’s gonna happen: (White’s) made some very negative decision in his mind — it’s him making his decision to assassinate Harvey. So for the titles Gus wanted to give a little bit of the sense of noir. Because it was this old footage it had a little bit of this noirish feel, so he said, “Take that montage music you wrote, and what if you played it with a saxophone?” So I did that, and it gave it a feeling of nostalgia.

There was always a sense working on “Milk” of it being a special thing and not wanting to screw it up. It sounds so corny, but I was honored to work on it.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/news/e3i85a08b80d9eabe09c0cbd1fee4895c29

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